GregHowley.com

Web Design, Feeds, and Interoperability

October 4, 2013 -

You may have noticed some minor tweaks recently on my site. If the formatting looks screwed up, just hit Ctrl-F5 and the stylesheet should refresh itself and fix the problem.

I redesigned the front page of GregHowley.com back in 2011, and this is the first bit of real work I've put into it since replacing my old manual news feed with my Google Plus publicly shared items. That's right - any time I share something publicly on Google Plus, it shows up in the front page "They Said" column. The character set still gives me issues there from time to time, and I still have the old news feed showing (outdated news) in the right sidebar on the blog detail pages. I should fix that some time.

The two recent changes I made to the front page involve reading a couple different feeds from different sites. Firstly, I cribbed some old code I'd written for my Raptr "recently played" Wordpress plugin - the one I wrote for Lungfishopolis before I threw that site in the recycle bin. Now my front page lists the five games I've most recently played without any involvement from me beyond actually playing the games. I played four of the five currently showing games on my PC, and they're coming from Steam through Raptr. The fifth is a PS3 game. Very cool that they'll all just show up on my website's front page now. Let's just hope that Lia doesn't play some My Little Pony game on my Playstation profile.

The last thing I did, which I'm presently happiest with, is to add a page/percentage counter to my book section. I've had the book section on my site since the site was first designed, and I've always logged way more info about each book that I thought I'd ever use. The ISBN, Amazon URL, lots of stuff. And now I've got it linked to my Goodreads profile to read just two tidbits of info: the page I'm currently on, which I can update from my phone's Goodreads app, and the percentage which is calculated based on that page number and the number of pages Goodreads knows is in the book. The percentage determines how full the progress bar is. So whenever I read, I just pull out my phone for 20 seconds and update the page number. Boom - there goes the dynamite!

All in all, the changes really only took 2-3 hours in a single evening. I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.